Objectives and vision

The main objective of this project was to deploy the e-Infrastructure built so far by the EGEE and DILIGENT projects so that they address the needs of several new scientific communities affiliated with the broad disciplines of Environmental Monitoring and data in a seamless fashion, enabled scientific communities to operate within a coherent pan-European model, regardless of the location of their research facilities. The project was progressively consolidated and expanded these open e-Infrastructures to better address the needs of the two major target disciplines (which have challenging differences but also interesting commonalities). Thousands of scientists obtained increasingly more facilities for creating Virtual Research Environments based on shared computation, storage, and generic service resources offered by EGEE and DILIGENT at a European level, as well as on data and domain-specific service resources offered by large international organization, such as ESA, FAO, and CGIARD. The envisioned D4SCience e-Infrastructure had a multiplicative benefit to many scientific fields and will also act as a catalyst for the kind of cooperation and cross-fertilization among multiple communities that is necessary for addressing many grand challenges of science in society.